


rapid eye movement

by ironoxide



Category: True Detective
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Character Death, Child Death, Coma, Gen, Hospitals, Science Fiction, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-10-25
Packaged: 2018-01-19 22:10:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1485919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ironoxide/pseuds/ironoxide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rust is a coma patient undergoing an experimental procedure to explore and monitor human imagination. Marty is his reluctant supervisor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. NOTICE OF ASSIGNMENT

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Synapse](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/23365) by chess_boxing. 



**Date:** 03 Jan 1995

 **Supervisor:** Martin Eric Hart

 **Assigned patient number:** 7

 **Assigned patient passcode:** 18211920

 **Scheduled link-ups:** 5

 **Notes:** Patient #7 has been in a medically-sustained coma for the last six years after being near-fatally injured in an automobile crash which also killed his three-year-old daughter (see: Family, page 4). Please refer to hospital notes on pages 3-5 for copies of patient notes regarding the extent of his injuries as well as a summary of his current medical requirements. He has been described as taciturn and unfriendly but markedly intelligent. Supervisor is reminded that Patient #7 has stipulated a Do Not Resuscitate order in his will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tentatively set to six chapters but we'll see oh we will see / i know they didn't have tech even remotely resembling anything like this in '95 (what am i talking about they don't even have it now) but pls suspend your disbelief / holla at me if there are any tags i missed


	2. LOGIN SESSION ONE: 03 JAN 95

The jetty juts out at a sharp, precise angle against the choppy curve of the bay, damp wood planks shedding splinters into the rippling water of the lake. The sand is not sand but chips of slate and broken shells, and the air is chilled and dry, and even the things that are static have something moving in them, something roiling just beneath the surface. It’s midday, but the sun is hidden behind a thick crust of clouds and everything has the same pallid grey tint.

Marty is standing on the jetty, and the wood feels spongy under his feet. A breeze shifts his hair a little. He hugs himself in the chill, and walks towards the cabin.

It’s the only thing that doesn’t belong in this wide, empty expanse. The only thing that doesn’t make sense. It’s _wrong_ , and no matter where he looks, his eyes are drawn back to it. There’s a weight upon every cracked tile on the roof, every weed that has grown up alongside the logs. It looks like it’s falling inwards, collapsing. He knows it means something, but his pulse is thrumming in his ears and he doesn’t really want to know what.

He raps on the door with his knuckles, twice. Apprehension curls in his stomach like a snake, tightening its grip around his heart as it beats, painful, in his chest. There’s no reply, but the door is hanging slightly ajar, and Marty’s about to push it further when a voice cuts through the air like a gunshot.

“Don’t go in there.”

Marty turns, and there’s a man standing in front of him, holding out a hand with the fingers spread, like a warning. He drops it to his side, and sniffs. Marty says, “What’s in there?”

“Nothing worth seeing.” The man sniffs again, pinches his nose with his thumb and forefinger for a second. He says, “Never seen anyone else around here before.”

Marty feels like a dumbass. He’s been trained for this, and he still doesn’t know what to say. He shrugs, curls his toes inside his shoes. “I’m just passing through.”

“Right.” He sounds doubtful, but he doesn’t say anything about it. He squares his shoulders, folds his arms across his chest.

“Kinda lonely here, huh.” Marty casts his eyes around the scene again, squinting at the soft peaks of mountains far in the distance. He wonders where he is. He wonders what’s in the cabin. He wonders why everything’s so grey. “I’m Marty. Marty Hart.”

“Rust.” And then: “Cohle.” _Personal cognitive recall_. Marty grins, and holds out his hand. Rust takes it, and his eyes are narrowed as he shakes twice, and he says, guardedly, “How do I know you’re real?” Marty blinks. He opens his mouth to speak, but Rust cuts over him. “You could be a figment of my fuckin’ imagination. I mean, shit, you probably are. Nobody ever _just passes through_ here.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Marty says under his breath, kicking at the stones under his feet. “No, listen. I’m real.”

He starts to crunch across the bay, heading for the jetty. Rust follows him, slowly. He walks weird, kicking his feet out, jerking his knees like he’s trying to knock them out of place. At the end of the jetty, Marty stops, arms folded, and waits for Rust to catch up.

Marty’s looking out over the lake, and the waters are constantly moving, splashing against the jetty’s supports. It’s a big lake, surrounded by rolling grey hills, closed in. If it weren’t so goddamn monochromatic here, it’d be nice. Quiet, like. Marty says, “Look, you ever seen me before?”

“Don’t know.” Rust’s still walking, footsteps slow and calculated. He comes to rest with a few planks between his feet and Marty’s, and he backs up to lean against the jetty fence. “Don’t remember you.”

“You ever seen _anyone_ around here before?”

“Nah.” Rust sniffs again. “Just me. Doesn’t really bother me much.”

 _Predilection to isolation._ “You always here? In this place, I mean, with the cabin.”

Rust’s looking around, lips drawn into a frown. He shrugs. “Yeah. I guess. Never really thought about it. The hell is this, anyway? You interrogating me or something?”

“Just trying to get my bearings.” Marty shrugs. “Hey, uh, Rust. Can you do me a favour?”

“Depends what it is.” Rust pushes away from the fence and starts to walk across the width of the jetty. He’s skinny. Curly hair, kind of brownish, or maybe dark blond. He’s wearing a plaid shirt, unbuttoned, and a white tee underneath, and jeans. He looks rustic, home-grown, like he belongs with the cabin. But the cabin doesn’t belong on the bay, and so neither does Rust.

Marty says, “Can you show me somewhere else? Somewhere other than here? Somewhere you’ve been before. Somewhere you remember.”

Rust watches him for a minute, then shrugs, and turns, and starts to walk back up the jetty towards the shingled beach. Marty follows, and it only takes a couple long strides to catch up. Marty’s used to walking quick, because he likes to get to places on time, but clearly Rust doesn’t mind being late. They’re crunching across the pebbles and then tracking onto a dirt road Marty’s not sure was there before. The road is thin and winding, gravelled and dirty brown, leading them into a thicket of pine trees. The air is closer here, and Marty can even smell the needles and the compacting leaves beneath his feet. They’re walking single file, and Marty’s stuck behind Rust, watching his feet to make sure he doesn’t kick Rust’s heels.

The trees thin out after a few minutes, and Marty looks up from his feet to see a dark sky and a sad, abandoned fairground sprawling out in front of them. He lets out a noise that indicates something like surprise, or maybe it’s closer to shock. Either way, it means that Rust is capable of creation rather than simple static existence. And honestly, Marty’s glad they left that creepy old cabin behind on the shore, because there was some serious emotional shit going on back there, shit he doesn’t want to deal with on top of everything else.

Rust’s stopped, and he’s staring at the fairground with something unreadable in his eyes. Marty wants to ask, but he’s pretty sure Rust won’t really answer, so he just gives him a little pat on the back and starts walking towards the fairground gates. Last time he was at a funfair it was with Maggie, with Audrey. Macie was only a baby, back then, and Maggie had held her on her hip the whole time. They’d drifted through the fair, and Audrey had begged to ride the ghost train, and Marty had sat beside her in the cart and felt her completely still beside him the whole time. He’d worried, for a little while, that there was something wrong with her, because at home that night she hadn’t asked if there were monsters in her closet, and she hadn’t crawled between him and Maggie in bed and whispered that she was scared of ghosts. He figured that she was just mature. That she knew who the real monsters were.

He didn’t tell Maggie. He rarely does.

There’s something empty about Rust’s funfair. It’s weird, seeing all the rides stood still like that; seeing it at night, with the lights off. Marty walks slow, trying to measure his pace. Left, right, left, right, left. He skims his hand over the back of a metal bench, feels the eroded texture under his fingertips. He cranes his neck up at the ferris wheel, at the rickety old wooden rollercoaster and its chipping navy blue paint. There’s no ghost train, but there’s one of those tunnel of love things, and a house of mirrors, and a pool of moss-crisped water with plastic ducks floating on the surface, and a china doll with a patchwork dress discarded in a trash can.

Marty’s staring at the china doll, and Rust’s staring at him, and Rust says, “Why are you here?”

Marty cards a hand through his hair, glances over his shoulder. Rust’s expression is measured, careful, like pretty much everything about him. He says, “I’m your supervisor.”

Rust rolls with that. He nods, like it makes sense to him, though it probably doesn’t. He sits down on the bench by the trash can with the doll in it, throws an arm across the back. He says, “Is there a way out?”

Marty sits down on the bench, side-on, with his back to Rust, and looks at his shoes. He says, “Depends. You ever tried?”

“Waded out into the lake back there and sat at the bottom with all the shit people throw in there. Empty beer cans, trash bags. Weeds tickling my arms. Sat there fuck knows how long.”

Marty squeezes his eyes shut tight. _Jesus Christ_. “What happened?” he asks, but he’s not sure he wants to know.

“Lungs started to ache like I’d been running for miles. Everything felt heavy, blurred. Then I pussied out and swam up.” He pauses. “Should have died, but I didn’t.”

Marty turns to sit properly on the bench, glances at Rust sidelong. Rust’s staring up at the ferris wheel, tracing the shape of his lips with his thumb. A rumble of thunder creaks through the silence; the air turns moist, and a fat droplet of rain lands right in the centre of Marty’s head. It doesn’t take long for the clouds to break, and then rain is falling thick and fast, congealing in puddles on the ground, slapping against Marty’s skin. Drops coagulate on Rust’s eyelashes and fall down his cheeks when he blinks. Each time lightning flashes, Rust’s face is thrown into sharp contrast, and his cheekbones cast deep, heavy shadows over his face, and his eye sockets are hollowed and black. Marty says, “Is this you?”

Rust says, “Rain cleans everything away.”

They sit there until the storm passes. Marty says, “I gotta go.”

Rust says, “Alright.”

Marty stands up, struggles to slide his hands into the pockets of his sodden jeans. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

Rust says, “Alright.”

Marty logs out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kind of starting to doubt that i'll get this done in 6 chapters but you know whatever


	3. LOGIN SESSION TWO: 04 JAN 95

There’s a figure knee-deep in the lake, and a brisk wind is shivering on the surface of the water, and even though Marty is standing on the end of the jetty he can feel the crisp, heavy presence of the cabin on the shore behind him. He toes off his shoes; he peels his socks from his feet and rolls them into a ball. In his pocket they are a lump of fabric pressing into his side. Marty sits on the softening wood and dips his bare feet in the water, toes first.

Rust is staring out at the mountains in the distance for a long time, and Marty figures he must be cold, because his own feet are starting to chill in the water. There’s something about the picture that reminds him of a painting he saw once, when Maggie dragged him to an art exhibition, before even Audrey was born. Some artist out of Mississippi, trying to make it big. Maggie had been so excited, and she’d had that look on her face, and Marty hadn’t really cared that he didn’t understand half of what she was saying about composition and light sources and textures, because she’d held his hand the whole time and that night they’d fucked in the backseat of the car and she’d bitten his shoulder so hard it bruised.

Marty says, “Hey, Rust.”

Rust turns real slow, and starts to wade back towards the jetty with his face screwed up, his mouth slashed into a diagonal line. The sun is leaking out from behind a cloud, but the light is filmy and pale and pathetic. Marty wishes Rust would think up some nicer weather.

Rust gets to the jetty, places his hands on the wood. He lifts himself up out of the water and sits by Marty and says, “Starting to think you weren’t gonna come.”

Marty can hear the edge of abandonment in his voice even though he’s covering it with a thick crust of indifference. He says, “Well, I’m here now.”

Rust is looking at him sidelong with that same scrunched-up expression on his face, squinting like he’s trying to work out some complicated equation. He says, “Yeah, you are.” And then, not disinterestedly: “Married, huh.”

He’s looking at the band on Marty’s left ring finger, and Marty nods, and shrugs, and says, “Yeah. Couple years, now. Don’t ask me how many.” He laughs, and glances at Rust, but Rust’s just staring at the water, kicking it with the tip of his shoe. For a second he looks like a kid, and Marty can see him as he probably used to be, gangly and skinny and freckled, wearing clothes just a little too big, scowling at the world, aloof beyond his years. He says, “I gotta do some tests.”

“Tests?” Rust says it like it’s causing him pain, and he’s looking at him again; squinting, kind of, with his mouth all bunched up like he’s just had a wisdom tooth removed. “What kind of tests?”

“Physics. Stuff like that. Gotta see if it all still works right here.” Marty shrugs. He doesn’t want to explain it because he knows he’ll sound like a dumbass, so he looks over his shoulder just to get away from Rust’s gaze, and he can see the cabin in the corner of his eye, so he stands up and hooks his shoes with his index and middle fingers, and starts to walk along the jetty back to the shore. He can hear Rust behind him, shoes pressing into the wood. Marty says, “That funfair still through the trees?”

Rust says, “It can be.” He’s crunching through the chipped slate to catch up. They walk along the dirt path again, and shards of gravel are pressing into the soles of Marty’s bare feet, but he can’t bring himself to put on his shoes. Rust’s jeans are dry.

The funfair is the same as it was before, except this time the sun is still up. Rust is padding alongside him, and Marty can feel the burning heat of the questions he wants to ask. He sees them like a torrent of water held back by a cracked dam, waiting to rush through like a rippling wave of grey silk. Marty says, “Any of these rides work?” because mechanical aptitude is as good a test as any.

Rust shrugs. He’s walking with his hands glued by his sides, like he’s an action figure, stiff and unresponsive. He says, “Might as well try.”

Marty heads for the ferris wheel because it’s closest, because there’s something creepy about the tunnel of love, and the rollercoaster looks anything but safe. Nothing could happen to him here, but that doesn’t mean he wants to risk it. He hops over the fence, heads for the control booth. There’s a half-eaten pack of chips discarded on the desk. Marty looks at them for a while.

“Rust,” he says. There’s a calendar hanging on the wall, turned to September. In the box for the twenty-fourth, a messy hand has scribbled _doctor’s at 3:20 – DO NOT FORGET_. Marty shifts, uneasy for a reason he can’t even justify in his own head. He wants to ask – about the chips, the calendar, the china doll in the trashcan. But he says, “You know how to work this thing?”

Rust is standing behind him, closer than he’d thought, and his heart throbs painfully at the shock of seeing him there. He slips past Marty, arm brushing against his chest, and flicks a couple switches. They watch the ferris wheel creak into life, the cabs swinging a little with the jerky movement. Marty reaches up to scratch under his ear, and his elbow displaces a spider web. The threads snap easy, and they hang suspended in the air, waving in the breeze like flags.

Marty says, “Isn’t it difficult?”

“What?”

“Concentrating on all this. All this detail, man.”

Rust shrugs, backs out of the booth. “Detail is the projection of importance onto insignificant things, Marty. Everything’s detailed if you look at it long enough.”

Outside, they watch the ferris wheel move through one full circle. Marty looks at Rust more than he looks at the wheel. It’s like knowing something bad’s going to happen, and wanting to look away, really, but there’s that pull, that irresistible tug, the whisper in your ear: _You’re just watching. Just observing. Just supervising. Go on, take a look._

So Marty looks at Rust, because Rust is this magnet, this glue, this nucleus. The fairground and the lake and the cabin – everything gravitates to him, and he’s holding all of it in his head; impossibly, _somehow_ , like he’s the god of his own universe. And Rust turns away when the wheel creaks to a halt, and he says, “I got something on my face?”

Marty laughs, shrugs. “Nah. Just wondering how you’re pulling this all off.” He pauses. “What’s it like?”

Rust blinks, and he says, “Every second I’m here I’m reminded of the fact that there’s something important I forgot about.”

And Marty, he swallows a little, because he’s thinking about Rust’s file, about his family. A wife, Claire. The Program wrote to her a month before they started link-ups and told her Rust was dead, that they’d done everything they could, that it had been peaceful. Marty’s seen the letters before, the lies, the cover-ups and double-crosses. His own wife thinks he’s dead, and he’s not, and she’ll never know.

And his daughter. Sophia. Rust, he’s driving her to the park – maybe to push her on the swingset, or walk her around the flowers and show her all the different colours – and there’s some asshole already drunk off his nuts and driving at half three in the afternoon, and he ploughs right the hell into the car. And Sophia, she’s a little thing, a wisp of a thing, and she dies on impact; but Rust, he’s still alive when the paramedics get there, and his body is fucked up. Broken bones, internal bleeding, haemorrhaging. Emergency surgery, but something goes wrong, and he slips into a coma, and they decide to keep him there, locked inside his own head, just in case they come up with something to fix him properly. And then it’s been six years, and the Program starts, and – because somewhere along the way his wife stopped visiting, and nobody ticks in the little box beside his name on the visitor’s list any more – Rustin Spencer Cohle is deemed a sufficient candidate, and he’s transferred to the facility, and all anybody ever calls him is Patient #7. And when there are complications in the move, and Patient #7 goes into cardiac arrest, they don’t let him die, because they need him for the Program.

Marty says, “Something you forgot about.”

And Rust says, “You know what it is.”

And Marty says, “No.” He’s lying, and they both know it, but the problem isn’t that Marty can’t tell Rust, because eventually he has to – the problem is that he’s scared, scared of what Rust will do, what he’ll say, how he’ll act. And Marty knows he can change the world, think up anything he wants, and he’s worried that the cabin on the shore is going to burst open like Pandora’s Box and all the shit in Rust’s head, all the bad stuff he’s locked away, is going to come pouring out. They warned him about violent minds; they called it the hostile subconscious, reacting to foreign synapses interacting with the host. Marty doesn’t want to see what’s in the cabin, but somehow he knows he will, when the truth comes out.

Marty says, “I gotta go now, man. Thanks for the demo.”

Rust nods, eyes pointed away. “Okay.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“Alright, Marty.”

Marty logs out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay wow i am sorry this took so long i suck / idk why i keep doing the notes like this it just looks cool / forward slashes


	4. LOGIN SESSION THREE: 05 JAN 95

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for blood and creepy stuff. seriously it's really creepy.

At first he thinks he’s in a snowdrift. White for miles, as far as he can see, searing his eyeballs. Details become clear through the mist, after a while. He’s in a hospital. Not much to it. No people. He’s reminded of the empty fair: another thing that isn’t supposed to be empty, another thing that shouldn’t exist once you take the people away. What’s the point in a hospital if there’s nobody around to fix?

Rust is nowhere. Marty walks until his feet ache, along corridor after corridor; the signs are blank, and even the colours look washed-out, like every time he looks away they crawl a little closer to white. When he looks up at the ceiling his eyes water, less like looking at a bulb and more like staring at the sun. He peers in rooms – stocked with the bare minimum: a bed, a heart monitor, a solitary chair – and even though he’s certain every room will yield the same result, he can’t walk past a door without opening it, just in case.

He considers shouting for Rust, but the air around him feels cloying, and he figures Rust won’t be able to hear, wherever he is. He takes the stairs to the next floor slowly, dragging his feet, and when he steps out onto the landing he worries for a moment that he hasn’t moved at all. Another empty corridor, punctuated with closed doors.

While he walks, he thinks about Maggie. She’s asking questions about his job: _Why do you need injections to supervise coma patients? What’s in that file? Why won’t you let me read it? Why won’t you talk to me?_ It’s not his fault; she’s the one who got him the job. She’s the one who recommended him, said he had a soft touch. Bullshit, but that’s what she said. He needed a job, so she told her boss, who told his friend, who told his friend, who told his friend, who heard about something from his friend, who’d mentioned the Program over lunch. And then the trail reversed, and Marty got the job, and now Maggie’s pissed because he signed a confidentiality contract and won’t tell her anything when she asks, “How was your day?”

He doesn’t even know what he’d tell her. Everything makes sense in here: he’s just talking, just checking, just supervising. Just supervising. But outside, waking up, slowly tugging the drip out of his arm, wobbling when he tries to stand, it’s like he’s looking at what he just experienced through the kind of glass people put in their bathroom windows. Everything’s distorted: he remembers Rust, but his features are blurry, indistinct. He remembers words, but nothing especially concrete, and the longer he’s awake, the harder it is to remember them.

Corridors melt into one, ice cream on a hot day. Each step is déjà vu, rewind and fast-forward, slowing down and speeding up to catch the one frame where everything’s half an inch out of place. The same movement of his hand, clasping the handle of the door, bringing it down, twist, push. Empty room, two steps back, shoulders slouch on an out-bound breath, and keep walking.

He can see the open door long before he gets close to it.

Part of him doesn’t want to get close at all. Wants to turn back, take the stairs, walk back to where he started. Maybe Rust’s there. Maybe they just missed each other. Maybe Rust’s looking for him too. The cabin on the shingled beach, sucking in air, light, twisting things around it; the open door. He’s three steps away from it. No Rust to stop him this time, no Rust to hold out a hand and say _don’t go in there_. He’s two steps away from it. Where the fuck is Rust? Where the _fuck_ is he?

He lingers in the doorway, and he supposes if he hadn’t been so hesitant he wouldn’t have noticed the writing on the plaque. Every other door he opened had a plaque, shiny and clear and blank, reflecting light. This one says _ROOM 418_. He steps inside.

“Rust?” His voice sounds loud; the solitary burst of noise sends a prickle of uncertainty down his spine like a chill. “Rust, you here?”

Rust is not here. The room is empty, just like every other damn room on every other damn corridor. Unoccupied bed, silent heart monitor, empty chair. He swears, under his breath. This isn’t a fucking game. This isn’t hide and seek. He has a goddamn job to do. This isn’t a _fucking_ game.

He turns, and there’s a woman standing in the doorway.

She has her hands on the frame, and her hair is hanging long and untamed over her shoulders. The hospital gown she’s wearing ends below her knees, but he can see her legs silhouetted through it. She’s looking somewhere past his shoulder, into the room. She says, “I don’t _feel_ so good.”

Marty’s mouth is dry; he swallows, tries to move but his feet are stuck fast.

Her head turns to the left and back again; she takes a step closer. Bare feet. “I don’t feel good at all.”

Maybe, maybe they hooked him up to the wrong patient. Maybe the reason he can’t find Rust is because Rust isn’t here. Maybe there’s been a mistake. He tries that: “I think there’s been a mistake.”

Her hands slip from the doorframe, hang loosely by her sides. She tilts her head to the side like a curious dog; her eyes are brown, dull as mud. “I don’t _feel_ so good.”

“I’m— I’m sorry about that.”

“I don’t feel good at all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t _feel_ so good.”

She takes a step closer. He takes a step back.

“I don’t feel good at all. I don’t _feel_ so good.” Her face breaks into a smile; she’s looking at something he can’t see, head twisted to the side. Marty backpedals until he’s pressed against the foot of the bed. “Stop it. Don’t. We’re _not_ calling her that. It’s not funny.” She’s laughing; one hand reaches out, makes a move like she’s pushing something away. “You want another whiskey, or you wanna shake it up a bit? I make a mean Orgasm. Baileys, Amaretto, Crème de Cacao—” And her eyes turn back to him, and her hands are shaking, and she says, “I don’t _feel_ so good, Rust. I don’t feel good at all.”

“I’m lost. I’m looking for someone.” Marty hates the desperate edge to his voice, but he can feel his heart jump in his chest, and she said his name. She has to know something. Even if all she can do is talk to someone who isn’t here. “Do you know where I can find Rust?”

At the sound of his name, her eyes snap to him; she sucks in a grating breath, coughs out a dribble of blood. There’s something dark spreading across her stomach, under the gown. _Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ._ “I don’t f- _feel_ so. I do-on’t _feel_ so good. I. I don’t. I don’t _feel_ so. I d-don’t fe-fe- _feel_ so. I don’t _feel_ s-s-so. So good. I don’t. I don’t _feel_. I don’t _feel_. I don’t _feel_. I don’t _feel_ —”

She’s still saying it, stuck on a loop. The darkness across her abdomen is seeping through, a red so deep and thick it’s almost black. Blood dripping onto her feet, pooling on the floor, spreading towards him, thick as syrup – “I don’t _feel_. I don’t _feel_. I don’t _feel_.” – and fuck, he’s scared, he’s so fucking scared, he needs to get out of this room but the only way out is past her and—

“Marty, don’t look at her.”

It’s Rust’s voice, faint and barely there, incorporeal. She’s blurring at the edges, flickering; in places her skin is grey. “Rust, where the hell are you?”

“Don’t look at her, Marty.” A little more desperate this time; Marty turns away from her for half a second, sweeps his gaze around the room. Her voice gets louder, a shout: _I don’t FEEL. I don’t FEEL. I don’t FEEL._ “She’ll go away. Just stop looking. Stop looking at her.”

“But she’s—”

“Fuck’s sake, Marty, _stop_ _looking_.”

“I _can’t_.”

“Don’t bullshit me. You can.”

“She’s—”

“Just close your eyes. Think about something else. Drown her out.”

“I don’t _FEEL_. I don’t _FEEL_. I don’t _FEEL_.”

“Fuck, Rust, I can’t, I can’t do it—” He squeezes his eyes shut but she’s just getting louder, a pained scream, breaking at the end of each stilted phrase. “I can’t do this, fuck, I can’t do this—” He wants to get out of here, he wants to wake up, he _has_ to wake up; deep, gasping breaths, hands shaking violently. There’s blood on his shoes when he looks down and when he looks up she’s an inch away from him and her face is so desperately terrified that he’s terrified too, terrified that the longer he looks at her the harder it’ll be to stop. She’s laughing, she’s smiling, but she’s not, but she is; he’s seeing two of her, _Baileys, Amaretto, we’re_ not _calling her that_ , and she’s smiling but she isn’t, she’s laughing but she’s screaming, she’s saying, “I don’t _FEEL_ ,” and he wishes he didn’t feel either, wishes he didn’t feel a damn thing—

When he wakes up, it’s harsh and sudden and disorienting, and he tears the drip out of his arm, sending a shower of chemicals across the room. He swings his legs off the bed, staggers in the direction of the door: there’s someone there, of course there is, hands on his chest, pushing him back. “The hell happened, Marty? Get back in there. The session isn’t over. You’ve still got fifteen minutes.”

“Fuck you. I’m not going back in there. Fuck this. _Fuck this_. I quit. I fucking quit. Get the hell out of my way.”

He throws up out on the corridor, wants to close his eyes and never open them again. In his head, he can still hear her; he wonders if she’ll ever go away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it'll make sense i promise ok
> 
> okay wow this was a long time coming. please deliver your thanks to [blackeyedblonde](http://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde) for kicking my butt into gear and inspiring me to start writing this again with her lovely words. u da best ❤


	5. [NO DATA RECORDED]

**07:13PM, 05 JAN 95**

“You have to talk to me.”

Maggie’s cutting a cucumber into slices, the movement of her arm like one gear turning in the collective mechanism of a clock. The knife rocks back and forth; her elbow’s jutting out and then rolling back in, out then in, out then in. The whole thing is subject to a series of increasingly alarming phallic metaphors that Marty doesn’t have the time to assess.

“I’m talking to you right now.” The ice in his glass is clinking against the side. He takes a sip, looks at the fridge, wonders if Macie will ever get tired of drawing princesses in pink dresses. At least Audrey has variety. He takes another sip.

“Words are coming out of your mouth,” out then in, out then in, “but they don’t mean anything. Talk _to_ me, not _around_ me.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” Another sip. “I had a job. I quit it.”

“But _why_?” The movement of her arm stops; she looks over at him, teeth gritted, and a curl of hair falls into her eyes. She flicks it away with a jerk of her head, sets the knife aside. “Why’d you quit, Marty? People don’t just _quit their job_ —”

“ _I’m_ people.” A hand flat on his chest, empathetic. “And I quit.”

“You’re covering old ground.” She scoops the cucumber slices into the salad bowl, starts to toss it with the leaves, the tomatoes, the peppers. Macie hates peppers. She’s going to spend the entire meal picking them out of her salad and complaining about it. Marty finishes his drink in one swallow.

“There’s no new ground to cover, Mags. I didn’t like it there. That’s all there is to it.”

Maggie seals the bowl with a fluttering cape of plastic wrap, sets it in the fridge while the chicken’s cooking. She shakes her head. “You always were a bad liar.”

 

**09:32AM, 07 JAN 95**

A rhythmic, crunching rustle as the newspaper page is turned. “You could try teaching.”

Marty rolls over, pulls the covers over his head. “I’d rather shoot myself in the foot.”

“If you don’t start cooperating with me,” Maggie says, her voice muffled and distant, “I’ll happily do it for you.”

 

**08:58AM, 09 JAN 95**

“I don’t think I can go to school today.”

Marty meets Audrey’s eyes in the rearview mirror, lets out a breath through his nose. “And why’s that?”

“I don’t feel so good.”

Marty blinks. “Don’t say that.”

She chews her lip in silence for a moment, swinging her legs. “But I don’t feel good at _all_.”

“Audrey, get out of the damn car.”

**3:45AM, 13 JAN 95**

He finds the file stuffed down the back of the sofa. One of the girls has been drawing in it: red crayon scored into the pages, stick-people holding hands, a landscape with the sun placed carefully in the top right. He flips through it without really knowing why. What little they know about Rust’s upbringing in rural Alaska, what little they know about his parents. His daughter gets a whole page, and one solitary, slightly blurry picture of her wrapped up tight in an incubator. His wife, Claire. It takes a few seconds for him to notice, but he’s seen her somewhere before. Long, dark hair, wildly curly; pretty, in a home-grown sort of way. The photograph of her isn’t particularly flattering, and it’s at a bad angle, but he’s seen her. He’s _seen_ her.

_“She’ll go away. Just stop looking. Stop looking at her.”_

He closes the file, and closes his eyes, and he thinks about Rust locked inside his own head, haunted by his own wife.

 

**9:17AM, 15 JAN 95**

He gets his job back. They tell him he’ll be linking up in under an hour. No hard feelings.


	6. LOGIN SESSION FOUR: 15 JAN 95

It’s fucked up, he thinks, that the shoreline is starting to feel like home.

Dim light speckled through clouds, footsteps crunching across the chipped slate. He jams his hands in his pockets, comes across a pair of socks rolled tight in a ball. Rust is sitting by the water, knees pulled to his chest. He looks small.

Marty sits down beside him. It’s been ten days. He wonders how long that feels for Rust. If he can measure time at all. If he bothers to. He says, “Long time, no see.”

Rust doesn’t move, but Marty can see him swallow. He watches the bulb of his throat bob and settle. “She spooked you, huh.”

“Yeah.” Marty brings out the balled-up socks, passes them from one hand to the other. A pause, stagnant. “You said you never saw anyone around here.”

Rust sniffs, shrugs, like it’s just one of those things. “It’s a long story, Marty.”

“I got time.”

Another pause. Marty unrolls the socks, sets them out beside him. Rust says, “I got lonely, a while back. Don’t much remember how it happened, but I was on my own, an’ then I wasn’t. She was there. Maybe I wanted company. Maybe I brought her into existence by sheer force of will.” There’s a hint of irony in his voice, bitterness. “I talked to her awhile. She didn’t have much to say. Kept laughing, repeating things. I s’pose I woulda realised sooner that she wasn’t… real. But I didn’t. I took her for granted. And then she started…”

“Glitching?” The degradation of her speech, not a stutter but a repeated, stunted beginning. Something broken. Like playing a scratched record, and waiting for the song to stop, to skitter back a second, over and over again until you pull out the plug.

“Glitching.” A long, boundless silence. “I figured it out pretty quick after that. She’s just a memory. My memory of her. She followed me everywhere I went, kept saying the same shit.” In the corner of his eye, for a half-second, there’s a flash of brown hair, eyes dull as mud, and a woman’s voice, pained to the point of anguish: _look at me, please, just look at me._ Rust says, “So I locked her up. Put her away. Somewhere I don’t want to be.” Marty can feel Rust’s eyes on him, cold and deep, like chips of ice. “She had to get an emergency C-section. Almost died right there on the operating table. Spent hours in the hospital, waiting for her to wake up, expecting that she wouldn’t. Thinkin’ somehow I’d fucked up, that I coulda done somethin’. Bullshit. Nothin’ I coulda done for her. Even before then.”

Marty doesn’t know what to say, so he turns his head away, blows out a breath. Maggie had a difficult birth, first time, with Audrey. And he’d been there (late, but that’s entirely beside the point), shouting at anyone who’d listen, _someone fuckin’ tell me what the fuck’s goin’ on with my wife_. He imagines Rust in a suit, standing at the end of the aisle, waiting for a pretty lady in a white dress. Doesn’t seem quite right; doesn’t seem quite _real_. But that’s just this place, he reckons. Nothing seems real, even when he wakes up.

“She, uh.” A pause. He coughs into the crease of his elbow. “You and her, you, uh.”

Rust turns his head and blinks solidly at Marty, lip curled. “Spit it out.”

“Don’t matter.”

“Marty.”

“It don’t matter, man. Really.”

“A’ight.” Rust swallows, the movement following through into an outward breath, his shoulders slouching. The hand supporting his weight is clawed in the loose slate shore; his knuckles are white with the effort of holding the position, worn skin stretched over nubs of bone. And then, tendons in his hand straining, a topographical map, as he curls his fingers inward to a fist: “Why’d you come back?”

“Felt sorry for you.”

“If I wanted pity, I’d have asked.”

“Didn’t know it was possible to be so ungrateful.”

Rust’s middle finger straightens up as he lifts his hand, brandishes the gesture at Marty like a last, feeble line of defence. “Met her at a bar,” he says past the finger, folds it down after a beat. His fist drops back to the ground, knocking against Marty’s hand. The touch is a catalyst for some kind of transference, some kind of data swap: a surge of colours, tastes, emotions run through him, jostling for importance. Deep browns, whiskey-burn at the back of his throat, a red-lipped smile, long-fingered hands on his chest, nails scratching over his back, a cool breeze on the back of his neck, brown eyes, coffee-warm and silken, teeth at his neck, a voice: _Get the fuck out. North Star? That’s fucking Mercury, you asshole. You get some kind of sick pleasure out of lying to me or are you just goddamn clueless?_ And a bright, warm laugh, the feeling of safety, of closeness, of surety.

Marty lets out a breath, shifts his hand away. “A bar, huh.”

“Mmhm. Like _de Lune_ , but with an e, she said.”

“’S funny.”

“She is.” Rust inhales, turns his head to the right, watching the silent leaves of the forest trees sway in a subtle breeze. “Could she come here?”

A swell of relief shatters inside him when he glances over to make sure that Rust’s head is still twisted away. “Maybe.”

“Maybe’s the kinda word people use when they want to say no, Marty.”

“Right. But it ain’t up to me to decide that kind of thing, man. This is— This is delicate. And there’s no guarantee she’d—”

“No guarantee she’d what?” It’s not even accusing, not even demanding. It’s just a question. Rust’s head rolls back to face Marty, expression carefully void. “No guarantee she’d want to? No guarantee she’d be able to?” (A flash of honey-blonde hair, gossamer pale skin, pink among the leafy green; for a moment it’s there and then it’s gone as soon as he draws his eyes away from Rust to look.) “No guarantee she’d—”

“Rust.”

A long note of silence. “What?”

“I just saw a little girl. In the forest.”

The note stretches out, hums, vibrating between them, and then Rust stands up, crunches over the shore until he’s swallowed up by the forest’s thick foliage. A prickle on the back of his neck, like someone dragging the tip of a cold finger down his spine; he looks back the way he came, blinks once at the distant figure further down the shore, hospital gown shifting in the breeze, and pushes himself to his feet.

“Wait up, Rust. I’m comin’.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dude. dude this took so long. i'm so sorry. i'm the worst. Bro. i'm the worst. :|
> 
> if it makes u guys feel any better, ghost hunting next.... .. .......... k gdbye


End file.
